for food. But the Capricorn-grub need not go in quest of
eatables: it feeds on its home, it lives on the wood that gives it
shelter. Let us make an attempt or two, however. I scoop in a log of
fresh cypress-wood a groove of the same diameter as that of the
natural galleries and I place the worm inside it. Cypress-wood is
strongly-scented; it possesses in a high degree that resinous aroma
which characterizes most of the pine family. Well, when laid in the
odoriferous channel, the larva goes to the end, as far as it can go,
and makes no further movement. Does not this placid quiescence point
to the absence of a sense of smell? The resinous flavour, so strange
to the grub which has always lived in oak, ought to vex it, to trouble
it; and the disagreeable impression ought to be revealed by a certain
commotion, by certain attempts to get away. Well, nothing of the kind
happens: once the larva has found the right position in the groove, it
does not stir. I do more: I set before it, at a very short distance,
in its normal canal, a piece of camphor. Again, no effect. Camphor is
followed by naphthaline. Still nothing. After these fruitless
endeavours, I do not think that I am going too far when I deny the
creature a sense of smell.

Taste is there, no doubt. But such taste! The food is without variety:
oak, for three years at a stretch, and nothing else. What can the
grub's palate appreciate in this monotonous fare? The tannic relish of
a fresh piece, oozing with sap; the uninteresting flavour of an
over-dry piece, robbed of its natural condiment: these probably
represent the whole gustative scale.

There remains touch, the far-spreading passive sense common to all
live flesh that quivers under the goad of pain. The sensitive schedule
of the Cerambyx-grub, therefore, is limited to taste and touch, both
exceedingly obtuse. This almost brings us to Condillac's statue. The
imaginary being of the philosopher had one sense only, that of smell,
equal in delicacy to our own; the real being, the ravager of the oak,
has two, inferior, even when put together, to the former, which so
plainly perceived the scent of a rose and distinguished it so clearly
from any other. The real case will bear comparison with the
fictitious.

What can be the psychology of a creature possessing such a powerful
digestive organism combined with such a feeble set of senses? A vain
wish has often come to me in my dreams: it is to be able to think, for
a few minutes, with the crude brain of my Dog, to see the world with
the faceted eyes of a Gnat. How things would change in appearance!
They would change much more if interpreted by the intellect of the
grub. What have the lessons of touch and taste contributed to that
rudimentary receptacle of impressions? Very little; almost nothing.
The animal knows that the best bits possess an astringent flavour;
that the sides of a passage not carefully planed are painful to the
skin. This is the utmost limit of its acquired wisdom. In comparison,
the statue with the sensitive nostrils was a marvel of knowledge, a
paragon too generously endowed by its inventor. It remembered,
compared, judged, reasoned: does the drowsy, digesting paunch
remember? Does it compare? Does it reason? I defined the
Capricorn-grub as a bit of an intestine that crawls about. The
undeniable accuracy of this definition provides me with my answer: the
grub has the aggregate of sense-impressions that a bit of an intestine
may hope to have.

And this nothing-at-all is capable of marvellous acts of foresight;
this belly, which knows hardly anything of the present, sees very
clearly into the future. Let us take an illustration on this curious
subject. For three years on end, the larva wanders about in the thick
of the trunk; it goes up, goes down, turns to this side and that; it
leaves one vein for another of better flavour, but without moving too
far from the inner depths, where the temperature is milder and greater
safety reigns. A day is at hand, a dangerous day for the recluse
obliged to quit its excellent retreat and face the perils of the
surface. Eating is not everything: we have to get out of this. The
larva, so well-equipped with tools and muscular strength, finds no
difficulty in going where it pleases, by boring through the wood; but
does the coming Capricorn, whose short spell of life must be spent in
the open air, possess the same advantages? Hatched inside the trunk,
will the long-horned Beetle be able to clear itself a way of escape?

That is the difficulty which the worm solves by inspiration. Less
versed in things of the future, despite my gleams of reason, I resort
to experiment with a view to fathoming the question. I begin by
ascertaining that the Capricorn, when he wishes to leave the trunk, is
absolutely unable to make use of the tunnel wrought by the larva. It
is a very long and very irregular maze, blocked with great heaps of
wormed wood. Its diameter decreases progressively from the final blind
alley to the starting-point. The larva entered the timber as slim as a
tiny bit of straw; it is to-day as thick as one's finger. In its three
years' wanderings, it always dug its gallery according to the mould of
its body. Evidently, the road by which the larva entered and moved
about cannot be the Capricorn's exit-way: his immoderate antennŠ, his
long legs, his inflexible armour-plates would encounter an insuperable
obstacle in the narrow, winding corridor, which would have to be
cleared of its wormed wood and, moreover, greatly enlarged. It would
be less fatiguing to attack the untouched timber and dig straight
ahead. Is the insect capable of doing so? We shall see.

I make some chambers of suitable size in oak logs chopped in two; and
each of my artificial cells receives a newly-transformed Cerambyx,
such as my provisions of firewood supply, when split by the wedge, in
October. The two pieces are then joined and kept together with a few
bands of wire. June comes. I hear a scraping inside my billets. Will
the Capricorns come out, or not? The delivery does not seem difficult
to me: there is hardly three-quarters of an inch to pierce. Not one
emerges. When all is silence, I open my apparatus. The captives, from
first to last, are dead. A vestige of sawdust, less than a pinch of
snuff, represents all their work.

I expected more from those sturdy tools, their mandibles. But, as we
have seen before, the tool does not make the workman.[5] In spite of
their boring-implements, the hermits die in my cases for lack of
skill. I subject others to less arduous tests. I enclose them in
spacious reed-stumps, equal in diameter to the natal cell. The
obstacle to be pierced is the natural diaphragm, a yielding partition
two or three millimetres[6] thick. Some free themselves; others
cannot. The less valiant ones succumb, stopped by the frail barrier.
What would it be if they had to pass through a thickness of oak?

[Footnote 5: Cf. _The Life and Love of the Insect_: chap. iii. "The
tool does not make the workman. The insect exerts its gifts as a
specialist with any kind of tool wherewith it is supplied. It can saw
with a plane or plane with a saw, like the model workman of whom
Franklin tells us."--_Translator's Note_.]

[Footnote 6: .078 to .117 inch.--_Translator's Note_.]

We are now persuaded: despite his stalwart appearance, the Capricorn
is powerless to leave the tree-trunk by his unaided efforts. It
therefore falls to the worm, to the wisdom of that bit of an
intestine, to prepare the way for him. We see renewed, in another
form, the feats of prowess of the Anthrax, whose pupa, armed with
trepans, bores through rock on the feeble Fly's behalf. Urged by a
presentiment that to us remains an unfathomable mystery, the
Cerambyx-grub leaves the inside of the oak, its peaceful retreat, its
unassailable stronghold, to wriggle towards the outside, where lives
the foe, the Woodpecker, who may gobble up the succulent little
sausage. At the risk of its life, it stubbornly digs and gnaws to the
very bark, of which it leaves no more intact than the thinnest film, a
slender screen. Sometimes, even, the rash one opens the window wide.

This is the Capricorn's doorway. The insect will have but to file the
screen a little with its mandibles, to bump against it with its
forehead, in order to bring it down; it will even have nothing to do
when the window is free, as often happens. The unskilled carpenter,
burdened with his extravagant head-dress, will emerge from the
darkness through this opening when the summer heats arrive.

After the cares of the future come the cares of the present. The
larva, which has just opened the aperture of escape, retreats some
distance down its gallery and, in the side of the exit-way, digs
itself a transformation-chamber more sumptuously furnished and
barricaded than any that I have ever seen. It is a roomy niche, shaped
like a flattened ellipsoid, the length of which reaches some eighty to
a hundred millimetres.[7] The two axes of the cross-section vary: the
horizontal measures twenty-five to thirty millimetres;[8] the vertical
measures only fifteen.[9] This greater dimension of the cell, where
the thickness of the perfect insect is concerned, leaves a certain
scope for the action of its legs when the time comes for forcing the
barricade, which is more than a close-fitting mummy-case would do.

[Footnote 7: 3 to 4 inches.--_Translator's Note_.]

[Footnote 8: .975 to 1.17 inch.--_Translator's Note_.]

[Footnote 9: .585 inch.--_Translator's Note_.]

The barricade in question, a door which the larva builds to exclude
the dangers from without, is two- and even three-fold. Outside, it is
a stack of woody refuse, of particles of chopped timber; inside, a
mineral hatch, a concave cover, all in one piece, of a chalky white.
Pretty often, but not always, there is added